PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY. 21 



mechanical view of nature has for many years been so 

 firmly established in certain domains of natural science, that 

 it is here unnecessary to say much about it. It no longer 

 occurs to physicists, chemists, mineralogists, or astronomers, 

 to seek to find in the phenomena which continually appear 

 before them in their scientific domain the action of a Creator 

 acting for a definite purpose. They universally, and with- 

 out hesitation, look upon the phenomena which appear in 

 their different departments of study as the necessary and 

 invariable effects of physical and chemical forces which are 

 inherent in matter. Thus far their view is purely material- 

 istic, in a certain sense of that " word of many meanings." 



When a physicist traces the phenomena of motion in elec- 

 tricity or magnetism, the fall of a heavy body, or the 

 undulations in the waves of light, he never, in the whole 

 course of his research, thinks of looking for the interference 

 of a supernatural power. In this respect. Biology, as the 

 science of so-called " animated " natural bodies, was formerly 

 placed in sharp opposition to the above-mentioned inorganic 

 natural sciences (Anorganology). It is true modern Physi- 

 ology, the science of the phenomena of motion in animals 

 and plants, has completely adopted the mechanical view ; but 

 Morphology, the science of the forms of animals and plants, 

 has not been affected at all by it. Morphologists, in spite of 

 the position of physiology, have continued, as before, in oppo- 

 sition to the mechanical view of functions, to look upon the 

 forms of animals and plants as something which cannot be 

 at all explained mechanically, but which must owe its origin 

 necessarily to a higher, supernatural creative power, acting 

 for a definite purpose. 



In this general view it is quite indifferent whether the 



